Day 150 - August 8th 2009
I woke up around noon (not uncommon after being down at Lickety all Night) and immediately hit the internet in search of bands to put in the room. A Night like we had last night just motivates me to work as hard as possible to make sure we maintain that kind of consistency. It was really an awesome night.
As I was on Facebook I get to talking to a girl named Kari Vassar, a Bi-Sexual Journalism major at Temple from Kansas. She was friend of my buddy Amanda who threw the vegan party Thursday Night. When she went from talking about Zines to the missionary position I thought “too good to be true“, and remembered Amanda’s singing name was Amada Kari so I put two and two together and was 99.9% certain that Kari Vassar was my buddy Amanda. She ended our convo by inviting me to this party tonight.
Looking into the event it was related to Fatebook a performance art piece/multimedia show/theatre performance. As I understand it the actual show is about 13 people who create characters/personas on-line then interact in a real space environment and tonight the cast members would be at this party in character and we would interact with them and possibly some other people interested in being extras in the actual show who would come in character as well.
I convinced Zach and Rob to come with me. When Zach and I arrived Rory at the front desk said write down whatever you’d like to be called on your name tag. So I opted to be a dude named Drake. Zach seemed to be interested in the idea of everyone at the party and the masks that they were wearing, the fact that pretty much everyone was coming as someone other than their true selves. Which is something that would be interesting to discuss. We all wear masks, but I told him I always wondered if people were in fact a truer version of themselves on-line talking to strangers than they would be to the people that they know, it was a pretty heavy conversation.
I always enjoyed playing make believe as a kid, When I was little I pretended to be Superman, a Ghostbuster, Teen Wolf, a Veritech Pilot Squad Leader (Robotech) a member of the Voltorn Force, a Late Night Talk Show host, a pro wrestler, and many other countless things. The whole concept of me being Boy Wonder is about escaping what I percevie to be my true self and becoming something else. It’s the most fascinating thing about acting, all acting basically is you becoming someone else, convincing yourself that it’s real, and behaving accordingly. So tonight I was Drake Grayson. It was cool at first almost liberating as you interact with people as this other person. A girl even got Drake to dance with her (something I never do at parties…the real me hates dancing)
But as the night wore on it got a little trippy. As Kari walked in and I began to interact with her what was happening really started to sink in. This guy Drake has been talking to people all night but there’s a good chance that none of this is real. Am I really connecting with people in a traditional sense? Would the real me connect with the real them if those two people were in the same position. A few beers’ll do that. Once I decided not to be bogged down by it again I dove back into the game everyone was playing.
Round midnight it was all over. I was impressed with the characters staying in character even in the bathroom during the last whiz of the evening and even walking out of the party into their cars. I had a good time I may even consider returning to acting and trying to be a part of this show as an extra or something.
I headed home and hit the hay, family Barbeque tomorrow
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